Antigua’s Foreign Affairs Minister, EP Chet Greene, has welcomed the return of Antigua-based carrier LIAT to St Vincent and the Grenadines, after the country restricted the airline for a few weeks.
LIAT restored commercial passenger flights across the region late last month, but announced early in December that services to Barbados and St Vincent and the Grenadines would be suspended, until new approvals were given.
Antigua’s cabinet also confirmed that [St Vincent and the Grenadines,] “have dropped its objections and will have LIAT land at AIA.”
Kingstown had inform the airline that new arrangements must be made for the airline to operate into St Vincent and the Grenadines.
The decision from both countries drew ire from the government, who called the reasons “subterfuge and trickery,” adding that they were seemingly intended to ensure that LIAT does not succeed.
Greene said the fact that LIAT is in the skies requires traffic for LIAT to be sustained and maintained in the skies. So, to have rights into Barbados [and] into St Vincent, that’s more than welcomed.
“CARICOM leaders, at their last heads meeting, would have looked at and examined the whole question of the integration movement and the notion of having movement between our respective islands.
“We’ve never had anything but good relations [and] one disagreement does not [make] a relationship spoil. [The fact that] Barbados or St Vincent would have had a different view on the matter, in no way at all takes away from the relationship between Antigua and Barbuda and these two Caribbean jurisdictions.
“Ralph Gonsalves has been the longest-serving prime minister of this era [and] Mia Mottley [is] the only female prime minister of the CARICOM region in this era, [so] they both understand the value of regionalism. I don’t think there’s anything untoward with the relationship.” Greene Noted.
Antigua Observer
